Importance
of scanning in document management

Not all organizations
have implemented document management. Only recently organizations are
looking forward to document management knowing the effect of document
management on the overall efficiency of the organization. There might
be organization where there are piles of paper files and documents dumped
over the years. They would have dumped them in a file room. In those
documents not all are necessary to be retained.

Consider the case
where you need to retain all those paper documents and that they might
be referred in the future for some purpose. It is going to be a tedious
task to find out the correct document you want in that pile of papers.
It is for this reason there is a need to go for document management
where all these paper documents are converted to digital form and stored
in the document management system. The scanner is an important component
of such a document management system.

Without the scanner
you cannot convert the paper documents into digital form. The scanner
converts all the paper documents into images. These images are stored
in the database. An OCR software is also used to extract text content
from the images created by the scanner. This text content is also stored
against the image. The purpose of extracting text is to use it in the
search module. When you are searching for a document containing a particular
text, the search module searches this extracted text and then find the
mapping image of the paper document and displays it for you. Hence the
scanner and the OCR software play an important role in document management.

When you look for
a document management system, make sure the OCR software and the scanner
are bundled in the offer. However, even they are not bundled there is
a need to buy them separately and integrate it with the document management
system. This is necessary to convert the existing documents into digital
form. Automatic feeding of paper documents in the scanner is available
as a feature in some of the scanners. You can look for such scanners.